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November Poetry: "Girls" by Ansley Moon

This November, to recognize and honor National Adoption Awareness Month, I've invited adoptee poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello to curate a folio of poems by 10 Asian American adoptees. This page features “Girls” by Ansley Moon. I invite you to take a moment to read her moving introduction to the folio here, as well as the other nine poems in this collection.

— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor

Girls

After Monique Truong

I.

What I know about you, little girl,would break you in two

splinter you into memory,your face a bloody rose on concrete.

Girl. Your body. Cataclysmic. Your body. Buriedunder the dung floor.

We eat over your bones. We fuckover your bones.

II.

When you splinter a girlshe is half animal, half God.

III.

I opened my legs and bore a beast

She was my third.I will my body “No more girls.”

This piece was published as part of the November Adoptee Literature Folio. To see other works from the folio, please visit the table of contents here.

Ansley Moon is the author of the poetry collection, How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press). She has been awarded fellowships and honors from Kundiman, Dickinson House and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.